March 31, 2008

Ada Louise Huxtable: Still giving buildings a good sharp kick

There's a piece of lost Chicago in Ada Louise Huxtable's study--a thin fragment ofdecoration from Adler & Sullivan’s Garrick Theater, senselessly destroyed in 1961. A Chicago preservationist gave it to her, she told me when I visited her in her New York apartment last Friday.

At age 87, Ada Louise—Pulitzer Prize winner, former New York Times architecture critic, author of books like “Kicked A Building Lately?” and now kicking buildings for The Wall Street Journal—is the grande dame of American architecture criticism, revered for her incisive observations and zinger prose. She’s also very sweet. Even the elevator man in her building says so: “Mrs. Huxtable—she’s a very nice lady.” Nice, of course, unless she’s taking aim at awful architecture.

During our talk, Ada Louise dropped the news that she’s got a book coming out next November, a collection of her columns from the Times, the Journal, and the New York Review of Books. She was promoting her book, of course, but I don’t mind telling you about it.

To be published by Walker & Company, the book is titled “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change.” It will span from the early 1960s to the present, telling a story of architectural revolution and counter-revolution--the rise of modernism, the reaction of post-modernism, and how they led to the bold new architecture of today. Ada Louise is still picking the pieces and arranging them, as an outline, marked up in red ink, revealed.

But the overall thrust of her coming valedictory is clear: “Looking back,” she writes in the publisher’s catalogue, “I realize that my career covered an extraordinary period of change, that I was writing at a time in which architecture was changing slowly but radically—a time when everything about modernism was being incrementally questioned and rejected as we moved into a new kind of thinking and building. And while it was a quiet, nearly stealth revolution, it was absolutely a revolution in which the past was reaccepted and reincorporated, periods and styles ignored by modernism were reexamined and reevaluated. History and theory once considered irrelevant became central to the practice of architecture again.”

It was a wonderful visit. We laughed and debated buildings and she showed me, also in her study, the original 1968 New Yorker cartoon that pictures two construction workers in hard hats with the unfinished steel frame of a building rising behind them. One says to the other: “Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn’t like it"

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this is simply marvelous. all that's missing here is the tea and biscuits that accompanied the tete-a-tete. or was it something stronger, the something that you sipped? already i am delighting in the rich conversation you put forth each day. it is enlightening, and fortifying. thank you.